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The Security Council's Peacekeeping Trilemma The Security Council’s peacekeeping trilemma Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/96/2/479/5612943 by CH Member Access user on 01 April 2020 PAUL D. WILLIAMS* United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations often produce positive effects and are comparatively cheap international instruments for managing armed conflicts.1 However, they usually deploy to theatres that are not a first-order strategic priority for the permanent members of the Security Council (P5) or the major financiers of peacekeeping; and numerous studies have highlighted multiple operational failings and limitations in these missions.2 The strategic limitations and weaknesses of UN peacekeeping stem from two principal sources. The first problem arises at the strategic level. Peacekeeping and peacemaking are distinct activities; it is belligerents that end wars, and if they refuse to do that, peacekeepers cannot force them to make peace.3 UN peace- keepers are thus heavily constrained by domestic politics in the host state(s). The second problem is that the international political environment places contra- dictory pressures on the design of UN peacekeeping operations and significant constraints on their likely impact.4 This article develops the strand of literature analysing how the international environment shapes UN peacekeeping by suggesting that the Security Council is one important source of such contradictory pressures. This is because the Council faces a peacekeeping trilemma—a situation in which three strategic goals coexist but cannot be achieved simultaneously for logical and practical reasons. * The author would like to thank Alex Bellamy, Katharina Coleman and Alexandra Novosseloff for their help- ful comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1 See e.g. Lisa Hultman, Jacob Kathman and Megan Shannon, ‘Beyond keeping peace: United Nations effective- ness in the midst of fighting’,American Political Science Review 108: 4, 2014, pp. 737–53; Andrea Ruggeri, Han Dorussen and Theodora-Ismene Gizelis, ‘Winning the peace locally: UN peacekeeping and local conflict’, International Organization 71: 1, 2017, pp. 163–85; Havard Hegre, Lisa Hultman and Havard Mokleiv Nygard, ‘Evaluating the conflict-reducing effect of UN peacekeeping operations’,Journal of Politics 81: 1, 2018, pp. 215–32; Hanne Fjelde, Lisa Hultman and Desiree Nilsson, ‘Protection through presence: UN peacekeeping and the costs of targeting civilians’, International Organization 73: 1, 2019, pp. 103–31. 2 See e.g. Severine Autesserre, Peaceland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), and ‘The crisis of peacekeeping’, Foreign Affairs 98: 1, 2019, pp. 101–16; CIVIC, Under fire: the July 2016 violence in Juba and UN response (Washington DC: Center for Civilians in Conflict, 2016). 3 See e.g. J. Michael Greig and Paul Diehl, ‘The peacekeeping-peacemaking dilemma’, International Studies Quar- terly 49: 4, 2005, pp. 621–45. 4 See e.g. Roland Paris, ‘Peacekeeping and the constraints of global culture’, European Journal of International Relations 9: 3, 2003, pp. 441–73, and ‘International peacebuilding and the “mission civilisatrice”’, Review of International Studies 28: 4, 2002, pp. 637–55; George Downs and Stephen John Stedman, ‘Evaluation issues in peace implementation’, in Stephen J. Stedman, Donald Rothchild and Elizabeth Cousens, eds, Ending civil wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), pp. 43–69. International Affairs 96: 2 (2020) 479–499; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiz199 © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] INTA96_2_FullIssue.indb 479 25/02/2020 11:37 Paul D. Williams Specifically, Security Council resolutions oblige peacekeepers to implement broad mandates (often in high-threat environments), yet the Council designs missions to be much smaller than relevant military doctrine suggests in order to save money. Furthermore, the Council prioritizes the safety and security of UN peacekeepers to avoid alienating the states that provide most of the field personnel. The Council’s strategic objectives for peacekeeping can thus be summarized as Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/96/2/479/5612943 by CH Member Access user on 01 April 2020 the successful implementation of broad, multidimensional mandates, minimizing peacekeeper casualties, and maximizing cost-effectiveness. The concept of a trilemma offers a useful way to think about how these inter- national political dynamics influence the design of UN peacekeeping operations. The Council’s peacekeeping trilemma is not new; arguably, it dates back to the 1960s and the Congo-related debates over the costs, legitimacy and effectiveness of multidimensional mandates that potentially involved the use of force beyond self-defence. The major new elements in the twenty-first century revolve around mandates related to civilian protection and the extension of state authority and stabilization. The three competing pressures on the Council continue to affect all multidimensional UN missions because each one has to be generated from scratch from unpredictable and fluid partnerships between member states, the UN Secre- tariat and private contractors. Overall, the trilemma has constrained the design of peacekeeping operations and set them up for failure. Yet the Council regularly criticizes troop- and police-contributing countries (T/PCCs) and the Secretariat for not delivering the desired results in the field without acknowledging its own responsibility for this. Fortunately, the trilemma is not immutable; policy-makers could mitigate and perhaps even transcend its most negative consequences. Mitigation requires the Council to champion and implement four main reforms to improve how missions are mandated, financed and generated: improving peacekeeper perfor- mance; holding peacekeepers accountable for misdeeds; adopting prioritized and sequenced mandates; and strengthening the financial basis for UN peacekeeping. Transcending the trilemma entirely is highly unlikely to be achieved, because this would require a fundamental reconfiguration and convergence of the three main stakeholder groups in UN peacekeeping—the states that, respectively, write the mandates, provide the personnel and pay the bills—in order to create much greater international unity of effort behind a re-envisaged peacekeeping enter- prise.5 Current priorities and conflict among the world’s Great Powers suggest that neither the required unity of effort nor the sustained, senior political leader- ship necessary to attain this outcome is likely to be forthcoming. 5 A fourth set of actors—the governments of states hosting UN peacekeeping operations—are important in many respects, but they respond to rather than determine the UN’s strategic imperatives in this area. Simi- larly, although the UN Secretariat has some autonomous power related to peacekeeping, it is not the ultimate decision-maker on mandates, contributions or assessed rates. See Thorsten Benner, Stephan Mergenthaler and Philipp Rotmann, The new world of UN peace operations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Silke Weinlich, The UN Secretariat’s influence on the evolution of peacekeeping (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); John Karlsrud, Norm change in international relations: linked ecologies in UN peacekeeping operations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 480 International Affairs 96: 2, 2020 INTA96_2_FullIssue.indb 480 25/02/2020 11:37 The Security Council’s peacekeeping trilemma To substantiate this argument, the article first describes the Security Council’s peacekeeping trilemma and its effects on the design of UN operations, before outlining the prospects for mitigating and transcending it. The Security Council’s peacekeeping trilemma Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/96/2/479/5612943 by CH Member Access user on 01 April 2020 A trilemma refers to a situation in which an actor wants to pursue three desirable goals but for logical and practical reasons can achieve only two of them simulta- neously.6 For the purposes of this article, the concept helps to illuminate how the Security Council’s preferences influence the design of UN peacekeeping opera- tions. The Council’s three strategic objectives for peacekeeping can be summa- rized as follows: • Maximizing success: enabling UN peacekeeping operations, if necessary, to fulfil broad, multidimensional mandates, even in high-threat environments. • Minimizing risk: improving the safety and security of UN peacekeepers to avoid casualties. • Maximizing cost-effectiveness: keeping financial costs down and using available resources efficiently. However, the Security Council is not the only important actor in the conduct of UN peacekeeping operations. Other stakeholders also weigh these objectives and, according to the relative priorities they attach to them, adopt negotiating positions in other institutional forums that the Council’s members are unable to control. While the General Assembly’s Fifth Committee on administrative and budgetary matters handles finances, its Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations (C34) provides the main arena in which T/PCCs can articulate their positions. The bureaucratic dynamics and organizational cultures that emerge in these distinct institutional forums intensify the Council’s trilemma. The Council plays the central role in designing peacekeeping missions and their mandates.7 It also sets the terms for the force requirements
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